When I was visiting Italian friends in Padua, Italy we were invited to a dinner in Venice. My Italian friends told me that the ancestors of my Venetian host were the first Jews to be released from the ghetto in Venice in 1870. My Italian friends later told me that the gentleman was no longer Jewish, because it is never safe to be Jewish. I wanted to answer a question: What must it be like to pretend you are something that you are not? And so I wrote my novel, The Bacchus Claim.